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I heard about this a while ago and signed up a fake account on my old computer to test it out. It took me all night to remove all the registry edits and hidden files:P. I didn't think it would be that insidious and difficult to remove heh. I very nearly despaired and reformatted. Not quite adware, not quite a virus, not quite a trojan. But it produces popups, self replicates and repairs parts of itself unless you disable that ability first, and takes control of parts of your computer. Nasty though any way you choose to define it.

I'm just surprised that anyone gets drawn in by obvious scams like that 0_0.

Extorting technologically naive people is still wrong. A victim is still a victim even if most people would feel that they should have known better.

Many people still operate under the assumption that people would not purposefully mistreat their customers so they take risks. Customers of a certain music company, which I will not name but which starts with an 'S' and ends with an 'ony' know this all to well. There was a video game company recently that used "copyright concerns" as an excuse to vandalize people's systems also, thought their name eludes me at the moment.

These are not isolated incidents as far as I can see. Music, porn and video games; it seems that any industry involved in entertainment generally gets around to abusing their customers.

True true Sean W. I think the conning nature of these fake porn sites (they aren't trying to REALLY sell porn, they're trying to con people. So they aren't even real porn sites) often gets brushed under the rug because some people feel that visiting such sites is morally reprehensible.

But even if that were so (and I don't think that it is), your statement "These are not isolated incidents as far as I can see." comes into play. This type of activity is really no different than fake paypal sites, or fake bank sites. Unfortunately some people seem to get a chuckle out of someone getting ripped off during what they see as a less than kosher activity.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that this particular article's topic is the same as the Starforce debacle, but I guess you could say that they are both misuses of the contract/exploit double wammy:P.

sometimes even the best protection breaks. :)
i would never give a credit card number to those type of sites. however even websites that appear legitimate and offer more mundane services can be a trap. my advice is wear at last three layers of protection. even legitimate sites can become infected. there is a wormy critter with a cold out there now. its receiving little press because it so far hasn't effected businesses. even more dangerous are nations that are constantly launching attacks and probing weaknesses. there are what is known as 'white hats' employed by these gov'ts whose 'main' role is security, then there are the mercenaries called 'black hats' and grey hats. hackers of the world unite....so the rest of us can line you up against the firewall. you may be able to crack into computers but i guarantee i can crack your head. i literally hate you. in fact i have helped get at least thirty int'l hacker crooks arrested and i'm happy to be of service to humanity. get out of your mum's basement or dinky environs and do something good with your life. surfers should always be mindful of sharks.

Oh, shaking hands with Mr. Johnson has become a slippery slope, ain't it! One could certainly argue that those lusty victims got what they asked for. But then there are the exceptions, like when I had a young nephew visit, and I forgot to turn on the parental controls. Oh, boy, I paid big-time, with phone bills for his little downloads and a Trojan horse that autodialed to porn sites from my computer without my approval! Yikes. But you have to admire the clever evilness of those porn scams.

No, you have to wonder at how dirt dumb you are...I know all you windows jerks don't want to hear it, but the real problem is being a member of the great monocrop. mac users being only at best one in ten don't suffer the same disease rate as you folks, simply because our density numbers are too low for the criminal mind bothering writing viruses or filthware-- the return and/or infection rate is too low to pay. Evolve, diversify or die.

I'm no microsoft fan wesgeorge, but what would you suggest? That everyone move to Linux? As soon as everyone dropped Windose, there would be NO MORE WINDOWS MALWARE. Then it would all be Linux. If everyone then abandoned Linux and went to the Mac OS, then there would be no more Linux malware, it would all be Mac OS.

Telling people "Don't use Windows morons!" is stupid. Regardless of what the most popular operating system is, there will be viruses, trojans, spyware, rootkits, and everything else you can imagine immediately out for it. Crackers don't write this stuff because they hate Microsoft. They write it because they are either:

1) jerks living in their mommy's basement with nothing better to do, or2) being employed by companies who are paying them to write it.

Either way, they will continue to write malware for as long as computers exist, regardless of the OS.

I would suggest saving your own butt and not worrying about how to save the other 2 plus billion hard drives on the planet. There are plenty of flavors of unix, linux, et al out there, if you are too lazy to avoid being part of the windose monocrop, don't expect not to be part of the annual crackr's harvest, eh? Stay one step ahead of the herd, to mix my metaphors.

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